There is no evidence that homeopathy is useful as an “integrative” remedy

In recent days we have learned of the sentence imposed in the first degree on the homeopath Massimiliano Mecozzi, which caused the baby’s death Francesco Bonifazi because he convinced his parents to administer homeopathic remedies instead of the antibiotic that could have cured him of a common ear infection.
We have discussed it in many, including Gilberto Corbellini and myself; Here I would like to add some further elements for reflection, abandoning the single specific case and making some general considerations on the way in which alleged “scientists” support the idea that, in any case, homeopathy is effective with false scientific publications.

Let us therefore consider the homeopathic “new frontier”, the sly thesis that homeopathy serves as an “integrative” remedynot a substitute for conventional medicine. This idea has the advantage of not taking patients away from truly effective treatments, without introducing anything that is dangerous, since, as is known, the homeopathic preparation does not contain any active ingredients. Not surprisingly, several companies promoting homeopathy, as soon as Francesco Bonifazi died, hastened to condemn Mecozzi precisely for not having integrated, but replaced, conventional therapy – even if the top executives of some of those same companies had previously written that homeopathic remedies were to be considered as valid substitutes for antibiotics precisely in pediatric otitis.
The idea of ​​the homeopathic integration of conventional treatments has made its way particularly in oncology, so much so that the usual region of Tuscany – for some time at the forefront in the promotion of pseudoscience of this type – includes homeopathy among the Essential Levels of Assistance for cancer patients.

But where is the evidence for integrating homeopathy into cancer medicine? Naturally, the expected evidence, not being able to come from regulatory agencies (which do not require and do not examine the evidence of efficacy of homeopathic preparations, rightly considering it useless) must be found in the scientific literature.

In December 2020, for example, Oxford Academics’ The Oncologist magazine published an article showing how the integration of a homeopathic treatment can increase the quality of life and even the survival of patients suffering from a severe form of lung cancer, a demonstration achieved through the most sophisticated of tools available: a prospective, randomized and placebo-controlled clinical trial, on three arms and multicentre.

Naturally, this excited the minds of homeopaths: the website of the Italian School of Hahnemannian Homeopathic Medicine (Simoh), for example, relaunched the news of the publication through a paper by Paolo Bellavite, a leading exponent of Italian homeopathy. Now, the trouble is, as I have argued many times, a publication is only the beginning of the evaluation of a scientific result, not its consecration; and therefore, in spite of Bellavite and Simoh, immediately numerous problems emerged in the work in question. The problems encountered could be easily explained by falsification and manipulation of the original data, and in fact the Austrian Agency for Research Integrity made a communication to this effect to the editorial board of the journal, which subsequently published a “Note of Concern “, that is, a signal that there are serious and sufficiently well-founded reasons for doubting the job in question.

Now, coincidentally, this story seems to repeat the case of a few years ago, when another work was retracted that claimed to demonstrate the effectiveness of homeopathy, a work that, similar to this last case, was accepted and relaunched uncritically from Simoh.

And here’s the thing: how many junk publications, retracted or otherwise suspect, continue to be presented to doctors and patients as “proof” that homeopathy works? How often will cases similar to those discussed have to occur, with the uncritical relaunch of such garbage, before the necessary caution and the necessary, meticulous examination of every publication that seems to support the efficacy of homeopathy – that is a fact that should be exercised change all our science?